END-TO-END COMMUNITY ATTRIBUTION:
Quantifying impact from a revenue perspective By Steven Yum, Community Team Lead, Common Room As a community manager, you want greater collaboration with your internal teams and support in advocating for additional investment. To do that, you need ways to show them how community work also helps them achieve their goals. It's the essence of community building—bringing people with you and connecting on what matters to them— and it applies to internal teams as well. It's important to take the time to understand what matters to each of the teams you talk to. Joshua Zerkel at Asana makes this the basis of his internal roadshows—understanding what matters to his audience based on what goals they're trying to achieve. For marketing teams, it might be expanding the reach of relevant content and raising brand awareness. For product teams, it might be addressing product feedback and understanding feature requests. For stakeholders who need to deliver business metrics, revenue is often a compelling data point. That being said, only 10% of community professionals cite an ability to financially quantify the value of their community (see the 2022 Community Industry Report). 8
COMMUNITY LEADERS
OCT 2122 APRIL
“By investing in the tools and processes to calculate communityattributed revenue, you’re pioneering an end-to-end customer community journey.” We’ve previously covered the technical considerations for evaluating tools and shared a roadmap to build your tech stack to support your community through its stages of growth. In this article, we’re going to dive deeper into what community-attributed revenue is and how to measure it, so you can concretely demonstrate the impact of your programs in terms more easily understood by your cross-functional stakeholders and executive leaders.
engaged in the community before they appeared in your CRM or Marketing Automation systems (like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo. For ease we’ll call it CRM below). By “community engagement,” we mean interactions with your community through any of your platforms. For example:
• Posting or responding to messages
on a chat platform like Slack or Discord or a forum like Discourse or Stack Overflow
WHAT IS COMMUNITY-ATTRIBUTED REVENUE (CAR)?
• Creating an issue in a code repo like
At Common Room, we define community-attributed revenue (CAR) as revenue from an organization whose member(s)
• Tweeting or posting comments on
GitHub
social media like Twitter or YouTube
